With the holiday season upon us, GOPC blog this week features one of our leisurely reading recommendations from this past year. We caught this article in Bloomberg CityLab back in September documenting the rise and fall of the country’s infatuation with pedestrian malls over a 50-year time period. The article ties back to the current moment by finding similarities between the pedestrian mall craze of the 1960’s and 70’s with the open streets movement that many cities took on as a response to the pandemic.

The 60’s and 70’s saw similar anti-urban crisis as 2020, where urban decline fueled an exodus of residents and businesses rather than fear of contagion. In an effort to draw individuals back, several U.S. cities followed a trend long popular in Europe and began shutting down streets to vehicular traffic to create pedestrian-only zones. Further supported by tax law amendments, zoning ordinances, and federal urban renewal funding, it is estimated that upwards of 200 pedestrian malls were created during this time.

The article links to a study published by the same author, Stephan Schmidt of Cornell University. According to the study, the average lifespan of a U.S. pedestrian mall was about two decades; of the 125 pedestrian malls investigated, only 43 are still open today. Schmidt offers several factors that influenced the success of the pedestrian malls of the past, including:

• Median age of the city’s population

• Foot traffic associated with nearby destinations

• Population density/urban sprawl

• Length of the mall

Schmidt links the success of older pedestrian malls with recommendations for the present, noting that 157 different local governments experimented with creating shared streets in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Temporary or permanent open street interventions can utilize a number of design interventions to increase desirability, with the addition of planters, awnings or tree coverings, or programmed activities in the space mentioned in the article.

As cities continue to consider how to adapt to the ongoing pandemic, many may consider making shared streets a permanent fixture. For more information on successes and failures of the past, read Lessons from the Rise and Fall of the Pedestrian Mall.